Right and Left React to the Tensions With North Korea

Mr. Manzullo is president of the Korea Economic Institute of America, which is registered as a foreign agent for South Korea. He enumerates the risks of preventive action against North Korea, writing that we cannot be sure such pre-emptive moves won’t start a second Korean War. Read more »

“For all of his flaws — and he has many — Trump isn’t really the problem here.”

Regardless of how the president responded to North Korea’s provocations today, Mr. Geraghty argues, the fact remains that the North is still making miniaturized nuclear warheads, and will continue to test its ballistic missiles. Unless China changes its tune, he writes, “either this president or the next will face a devastating choice among bad options.” Read more »

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From the Left

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President Trump on Tuesday in Bedminster, N.J.Credit
Al Drago for The New York Times

“President Trump is simply too erratic, unstable and dangerous to be in charge in a situation like this.”

Mr. Marshall tells his readers: If you weren’t worried before, now you should be. Although he acknowledges that today’s confrontation with North Korea is “neither new nor entirely of President Trump’s making” — Mr. Marshall believes that “George W. Bush’s administration wrecked a not great but workable formula in 2001-2003” — the current president’s belligerent statements are making a bad situation worse. Read more »

“What makes Trump’s loose talk — and ignorance — about nuclear weapons particularly worrisome is that in the past, he has taken a fatalistic approach toward the notion of nuclear war.”

Written before the inauguration, Mr. Corn’s article argues that Mr. Trump’s attitudes toward nuclear war have been consistently fatalistic for decades. The president’s persistent remarks that nuclear conflict is inevitable, Mr. Corn writes, are the “stuff of nightmares.” Read more »

Late last month, Mr. Hertsgaard wrote this article outlining the process by which a president can deploy nuclear missiles. While presidents have historically had unfettered authority to launch these weapons, he writes, there is precedent for the military to “veto an ill-advised attack order.” “The system” by which the commander in chief can launch nuclear missiles, Mr. Hertsgaard writes, “must change.” Read more »

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And Finally, From the Center:

“Ignorant of the long history of the problem, Trump at least brings fresh eyes to it. But he is going to collide with the same harsh truth that has stymied all his recent predecessors: There are no good options for dealing with North Korea.”

How did we get to this point and what do we do from here? In this cover story for The Atlantic’s July/August issue, Mr. Bowden puts the history of North Korea in context and explains four paths forward for the United States: Prevention, Turning the Screws, Decapitation, and Acceptance. None of them seem particularly appealing. Read more »

“The only way to pressure a nuclear or near-nuclear power to the table is with economic sanctions that weaken the regime without threatening its existence.”

Written just before Mr. Trump issued his warning to North Korea, Mr. Feldman’s article charts the ways in which this administration’s antinuclear playbook mirrors his predecessor’s model in dealing with Iran. Read more »

“With North Korea making what looks like rapid progress in the pursuit of its own nuclear arsenal, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s recent call for us ‘to truly realize a world without nuclear weapons’ has rarely been more timely or more desperate.”

Seventy-two years ago this week, Mr. Walther reminds his readers, the United States committed war crimes against Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To say otherwise, he writes, is to deny what is more accurately described as “state-sponsored mass murder.” Mr. Walther, who identifies the Catholic faith as the motivating force behind his politics, writes in support of global nuclear disarmament. He notes that while “conservatives and hard-nosed centrists tend to scoff at the idea,” a world without nuclear weapons is no “hippie fantasy.” Read more »